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AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

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Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#71

Post by darkerside »

RogerL wrote: post #63
bamboozled wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a concern I have too, when I get tired, I start to just delegate to co-pilot suggestions as I get desperate, if I didn't have co-pilot, I'd probably just log off for the day. I actually don't really use copilot as I didn't find it that helpful, so I don't really have the problem anymore, but I could see it was a danger. Bit like driving when tired.

I look at is as asking an intern to do some work that I don't have time for. Do I have to check their work? Yes. Might I have to correct and guide the outcome? Again, yes. Am I going to ask them to implement something novel and groundbreaking? Not really, that'd be a disaster unless they are a prodigy. None of that removes my capacity, or any kind of danger.

It's funny, the slowness of the intern is probably a feature. You delegate, and you don't have to deal with it until you are refreshed.

With AI, you delegate, and then you need to review in the next minute while you are still exhausted.

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#72

Post by jazzyjackson »

RogerL wrote: post #63
bamboozled wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a concern I have too, when I get tired, I start to just delegate to co-pilot suggestions as I get desperate, if I didn't have co-pilot, I'd probably just log off for the day. I actually don't really use copilot as I didn't find it that helpful, so I don't really have the problem anymore, but I could see it was a danger. Bit like driving when tired.

I look at is as asking an intern to do some work that I don't have time for. Do I have to check their work? Yes. Might I have to correct and guide the outcome? Again, yes. Am I going to ask them to implement something novel and groundbreaking? Not really, that'd be a disaster unless they are a prodigy. None of that removes my capacity, or any kind of danger.

if you don't have time to do work then you don't have time to mentor an intern doing that work

if you're just delegating work you don't have an intern, you have an undercompensated employee

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#73

Post by jazzyjackson »

elif wrote: post #62
userbinator wrote: post #55

As others have mentioned, unless you have a strong conscience and really know what you're doing, it's far too tempting to just accept AI-generated suggestions without really thinking, and IMHO losing that understanding is a dangerous path to go down. AI can only increase quantity, not quality. The industry desperately needs far more of the latter. Related: https://navendu.me/posts/ai-generated-spam-prs/

Not to be rude but I have a hard time relating. Code is its own meaning, and to read it is to understand it. The only way you can use code you don't "understand" is to lack understanding of the language you are using.

I have seen with my own two eyes programmers push code they didn't read because it produced the expected output, whether via chatgpt or stack overflow, copy paste, run, passed the tests

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#74

Post by kgilpin »

When AI is used properly, it’s doing one of two things:

1) Making non-controversial fixes that save time and take cognitive load off the developer. The best example is when code completion is working well.

2) It’s making you smarter and more knowledgeable by virtue of the suggestions it makes. You may discard them but you still learn something new, and having an assistant brainstorm for you enables a different mode of thinking - idea triage - that can be fun, productive, useful and relaxing. People sometimes want completion to do this also, but it’s not well suited to it beyond teaching new language features by example.

The article makes an interesting assertion that AI tools “fail to scale” when the user has to remember to trigger the feature.

So how can AI usefully suggest design-level and conceptual ideas in a way that doesn’t require a user “trigger”? Within the IDE, I’m not sure. The example given of automated comment resolution is interesting and “automatic”, but not likely to be particularly high level in nature. And it also occurs in the “outer flow” of code review. It’s the “inner flow” that’s the most interesting to me because it’s when the real creativity is happening.

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#75

Post by codr7 »

refulgentis wrote: post #37
jprete wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know of no review process that produces the same level of understanding as does authorship, because the author must build the model from scratch and so must see all the details, while the reviewer is able to do less work because they're fundamentally riding on the author's understanding. In fact, in a high-trust system, e.g. a good engineering culture in a tech company, the reviewer will learn even less, because th…

So the software lifecycle ends up with a sort of Zeno's paradox, each incremental maintainer understands the system less...fascinating, ty!

I believe pretty much anyone who has observed a few cycles can tell as much.

Often the major trigger for a rewrite is that the knowledge has mostly left the building.

But then there's the cognitive dissonance; because the we like pretending that the system is the knowledge and thus has economic value in itself, and that people are interchangeable. None of which is true.

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#76

Post by willsmith72 »

userbinator wrote: post #55

As others have mentioned, unless you have a strong conscience and really know what you're doing, it's far too tempting to just accept AI-generated suggestions without really thinking, and IMHO losing that understanding is a dangerous path to go down. AI can only increase quantity, not quality. The industry desperately needs far more of the latter. Related: https://navendu.me/posts/ai-generated-spam-prs/

I disagree. I don't want to go into the docs to understand specific syntax or options of a library. Just let me write in natural language what I want and give me the result

If I can't tell based on the code what it's supposed to do, then it's a shitty library or api.

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#77

Post by leoh »

Google has been really lost here over the last several years. When lambda and bard were already killer at producing reasonable code and OpenAI had scarcely released anything, there was an explicit embargo against using them internally.

When Blake Lemoine was talking nonsense about lambda being conscious in June ‘22, these internal models were already killer at producing code. ChatGPT wouldn’t be released for another 5-6 months.

https://theconversation.com/is-googles-lamda-conscious-a-phi...

Re: AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

#78

Post by Auracle »

bitwize wrote: post #47

Today on Facebook I saw a headline: "Marvel Fans Want to See Miley Cyrus as Rogue in the MCU". And I thought to myself: Which Marvel fans? And now... > Just five years later, in 2024, there is widespread enthusiasm among software engineers about how AI is helping write code. Which software engineers?

There are plenty in this post, and I'm one of them.

It may or may not be great for job prospects, but as someone who isn't one of you fancy startup/FAANG super programmers it's great for me to be able to ask it design problems, what the 'best' way to do a certain thing is, or tell it "I need a function given x,y, and z that does this and returns this."

There are plenty of instances where it doesn't make sense to use it, but I always have a tab with ChatGPT open when coding now. Always.

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